Clarence Thomas

Anita Hill: Say the name and the response will be telling, depending on the age and political leanings of the listener. Hill's grueling 1991 testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was a turning point in America politics — and a sometimes surreal one, at that. She had been called to testify on Thomas' character, based on a private interview she had given to the FBI. To the committee and a shocked national television audience, she detailed the ways Thomas had sexually harassed her when he was her boss at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Hill recounted the range of...

Related "Clarence Thomas" Articles

Anita Hill: Say the name and the response will be telling, depending on the age and political leanings of the listener.
Hill's grueling 1991 testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice...

Anodyne euphemisms often indicate an uneasy conscience or a political anxiety. Or both, as when the 1976 Democratic platform chose "compensatory opportunity" as a way of blurring the fact that the party favored racial discrimination in the...

Good for Sonia Sotomayor.
She called out her U.S. Supreme Court peers for their dismissive attitudes toward our nation's troubling racial history and their wishful thinking on how far we have come in such matters.
"The way to stop discrimination on...

As undignified as it is unedifying and unnecessary, the vulgar State of the Union circus is again at our throats. The document that the Constitutional Convention sent forth from Philadelphia for ratification in 1787 was just 4,543 words long, but this was...

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, notwithstanding the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and searches without a warrant based on probable cause, states can require that a DNA sample be taken from those arrested for...

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy nominated 15 new Superior Court judges Thursday, including prominent Republican Andrew Roraback among the familiar names in the political and legal worlds.Many people had considered Roraback the Republican Party's best chance to...

Facing budget cuts in 2009, state police eliminated a program that put troopers in schools across the state.
It was the end of a program that at one time, when federal money was flowing, had as many as 40 state troopers in public schools, most of them in...

A willow, not an oak. So said conservatives of Chief Justice John Roberts when he rescued the Affordable Care Act — aka Obamacare — from being found unconstitutional. But the manner in which he did this may have made the ACA unworkable, thereby putting it...

Dyann Chepulis never saw the $1.7 million the owners of the Kleen Energy plant paid to settle her lawsuit stemming from the 2010 Middletown natural-gas power plant explosion that killed her husband.Four days after a probate court judge in Litchfield...

A federal judge has delayed a decision on whether a local official in Kentucky can use her religious beliefs to justify not issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis stopped issuing marriage licenses after the U.S....

WASHINGTON Sen. Barbara Boxer and fellow California Democrat George Miller and their spouses used to spend weekends together, just a pair of couples taking a break from the pressures and strains of Capitol Hill. But while Miller, who spent four...

The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for Oklahoma to continue using a lethal drug cocktail for executions, but, in a surprising dissent, two liberal justices opened the door to what could become a historic challenge to the death penalty itself.
By...

The Supreme Court acted Monday to keep Texas' 19 abortion clinics open, amid a legal fight that threatens to close more than half of them.
The justices voted 5-4 to grant an emergency appeal from the clinics after a federal appeals court...

The Supreme Court has blocked Obama administration rules designed to sharply limit the hazardous air pollutants that spew from the nation's power plants.
The justices by a 5-4 vote agreed with the coal industry and Republican-led states that...

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in an unusual separate opinion in a case, wrote that it may be time for judges to limit the use of long-term solitary confinement in prisons.
His comments accompanying a decision issued Thursday marked a rare...

The Supreme Court will decide a seemingly simple question this month in the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act: Does the law limit subsidies for low- and moderate-income consumers to insurance purchased through an exchange “established by the...

The Supreme Court strengthened civil rights protections Monday for employees and job applicants who need special treatment in the workplace because of their religious beliefs.
The justices sided with a Muslim woman who did not get hired after she...

For 50 years the “one person, one vote” principle has been used to divvy up political power by counting all people in states and putting them into electoral districts of roughly equal size.
But the mathematics of power may be about to change in a way...

The Supreme Court delivered a rare victory for minority voting rights Wednesday, finding that a 2012 Alabama redistricting plan appeared to violate federal law by shifting black voters into districts they already dominated to dilute their influence...